2017

Thank you for finding this blog post. I like to start my blog post with giving thanks for my readers. The title of this blog post I have Duckduckgo search engine to thank.

I confess that I am not very good at giving thanks. I know I should do it more. I know it’s supposed to be a healthy thing to do. Recent research about our brains has found more scientific evidence for what gratitude does for each person. Here’s a few of the many health benefits of gratitude:

Less bothered by aches and pains

Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking

More alert, alive, and awake

More joy, pleasure, and happiness

It seems to me that in the recent years, there’s a lot more chatter about gratitude, like the neurological benefits, and how giving thanks (more often using the word gratitude than giving thanks) has become more mainstream with gratitude journal, with Oprah talking about it (there’s an indicator of mainstreaming). Here’s a popular video that has helped people feel more gratitude to give more thanks.

Acclaimed filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg’s TEDx talk on gratitude went viral (meaning it got millions of views, and counting). For those you who are visual, watch this and feel how gratitude starts to gush to overflowing.

For whatever reasons in recent history, we here in the United States are hearing more about hurricanes and massacres and scandals. That can be understandable weighty. And this is added on top of the human condition, where occasionally people get diseases, like nobody wants to hear the words, “You have cancer.” Some people lose loved ones to whatever causes of death, that is, the sting of death is still a painful loss.

When people experience pain and suffering, it provokes 2 reactions about the existence of God. For some it drives them to anger and bitterness against God, because if he was powerful he could have stopped the bad thing from happening. For others, it drives them to God for comfort, help, and strength, because the pain is too much to bear alone.

Thank you for being readers of this prayer blog that are following along with my experiement in blogging for 30 weeks. This is my experiment in practicing praying by blogigng and also minimizing the use of Christian jargon that is hard for normal people to understand.

This is my prayer for readers of this blog, both current ones and future ones.

Praying is a conversation with God. When the conversation includes several other people, it’s even better. Praying together is better because others can join in agreement, God listens to those words more emphatically, in one sense. Praying together brings people relationally and spiritually closer. There are other benefits I think, even though I don’t have them at the top of my mind right now.

Something I’m learning and exploring is the lost art of written prayers, or in today’s time, typed out prayers. That’s what this blog is about, my prayer blogging. But there’s another way I’ve recently started praying, and that is to share a prayer that I’ve prayed through typing it out.

Making sense of prayer has taken me a long time. Many years. Like several decades. For those that are new readers to this blog post, I’m talking to God through my blogging and you’re getting to look over my shoulders. My hope is that my honest conversation will some of you to discover how you can enjoy talking with God more. And when you enjoy talking with God more, you’ll talk to God more often. That’s a good thing.